Hello friends, just a quick word of encouragement. I've been running a lot. Running has been an amazing

outlet to keeping my mind clear, processing all of the emotions that had inevitably come

up in the season of transition. And in my running, I have been listening to sermons

every once in a while. You need not be a person who is a believer to get the thing I am going

to share with you today. But there's a pastor named Stephen Fertic who I've been listening

to quite a bit of. And there was something in my run the other day that just man struck

such a chord. It stood out. And I want to share it with you because it's about storms.

We are collectively experiencing a storm in this pandemic. There is something in the thing

that we are all collectively going through that just has created headwinds. It's uncomfortable.

It's different. We are grieving what used to be and are struggling in some ways with connection

and loneliness and the pressures of continuing to show up well for ourselves when life just

feels hard. And in this sermon, he was talking about storms. And the point that he made that

landed so squarely on me is that the first storm oftentimes isn't even necessarily a storm

of our own creation. It can be a storm that whether we like it or not has found its way

into our life in such as the case with this pandemic. But the first storm isn't the storm

that inflicts the most damage. It's the secondary storm that we create in reaction to the storm

that has found its way into our life that actually is the thing that derails us, that throws

us off track, that makes our situation worse than it needs to be. And what is a secondary

storm? Right? A secondary storm is getting stuck in negative self-talk. A secondary storm

is getting out of good routine. A secondary storm is choosing to drink as a coping mechanism

instead of moving your body. A secondary storm is the things that we as humans sometimes find

ourselves doing in response to the storm that don't serve us weathering that storm, that don't

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